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Friday, February 13, 2015

Dog Have Mercy (Golden Retriever Mysteries Book 6) by Neil S. Plakcy

In the sixth golden retriever mystery, Dog Have Mercy, Christmas
approaches and reformed hacker Steve Levitan tries to help a fellow
ex-con now working at the vet’s office in Stewart’s Crossing. His
curiosity, and the crime-solving instincts of his golden retriever,
Rochester, kick in when liquid potassium ampoules are stolen from the
vet and Steve’s new friend is a suspect.

Is this theft connected to a drug-running operation in North Philly?
Or to a recent spate of deaths at the local nursing home? And can Steve
continue to resist his computer-hacking impulses or will his desire to
help others continue to lead him into trouble?

Excerpt:

Sunday morning
my golden retriever Rochester didn’t want to walk very far, which
was unusual for my happy-go-lucky dog, and he seemed to be favoring
his back right leg. I was attuned to his moods and I’d learned that
he could be very skilled at hiding pain. When we got home, I sat down
on the tile floor and pulled him over to me. “Let’s see what
you’ve got going on, puppy,” I said.

He squirmed and
wiggled but I immobilized him and shifted so I could see check each
of his paws. He had torn a toenail on one of his back paws, and the
nail bed was red and swollen. “What did you do? I trimmed your
toenails last week.”

He looked up at
me with a woeful face. We had a regular grooming routine. I cleaned
his teeth every couple of days with turkey-flavored toothpaste; I
groomed him with a special brush that pulled dead fur from his
undercoat; I swabbed his ears with medicated pads and whenever his
toenails got too long I trimmed them with an electric gadget.

“What’s up?”
Lili asked as she walked downstairs.

“We’re going
to have to go see Dr. Horz first thing tomorrow morning,” I said.
“Rochester has an infected toenail.” I cleaned the wound and
squeezed some antibiotic ointment onto it, and then sat on the floor
scratching Rochester’s belly.

My old piano
teacher Edith Passis called later that day to thank us for visiting
her at the Crossing Manor rehab center and nursing home. “It was so
wonderful to see you,” she said. “I admit, I get a little
depressed here. Sometimes it feels like God’s waiting room, that
people come here to die. My roommate, that poor Mrs. Tuttle? She
passed away right after you came to see us.”

“I’m sorry,
Edith,” I said.

“I’m sure it
was her time, dear,” Edith said. “It was very sweet that she
reached out to Rochester just before she died. He might have been the
last being who touched her.”

I shuddered.
Rick had occasionally referred to Rochester as “the death dog,”
because he had a knack for finding dead bodies, or clues in the
solution of who killed them. I didn’t want to believe that he’d
moved on to initiating the deaths of people who petted him.

I chatted with
Edith for a few minutes and promised to bring Rochester for another
visit soon. Lili went out to take some photographs around River Bend,
our townhome community, and I went up to the office. Rochester
followed me, and once I was in my chair, he slumped down at my feet.

I opened the
desk drawer and pulled out the laptop I had inherited, along with
Rochester, from my late next-door-neighbor Caroline Kelly. It was
close to four years old, at least, and didn’t have as much power as
my desktop computer, but I kept my hacking tools on it. I didn’t
have any plans to break in anywhere I didn’t belong, but I did want
to keep my software updated.

The online
hacker support group I had joined would have called that a red flag –
simply thinking about hacking was enough to trigger an alert. But I
was trying to channel my impulses to snoop in protected
places—recognizing that I’d always have those urges, and that if
I tried to ignore them completely I’d only get myself in trouble.

Hackers are an
elusive bunch, and the sites where people uploaded new and improved
tools were always changing, so I had to keep up. As it was, several
of the sites I’d bookmarked had been shut down, and I spent an hour
following coded messages and encrypted links before I could find
where my tribe was hiding.

I read blogs and
posts about updated port sniffers and password-breaking programs, and
downloaded a couple of programs. While I waited for the last of them
to come through, I remembered our conversation with Rick and Tamsen
the night before, that an ex-con with a long record had been arrested
for the break-ins at Crossing Estates.

There but for
the grace of God go I, I thought. I had been incredibly lucky in my
online forays. I had only made one major mistake, and I had paid for
that. But I had done many other things, almost all with good
intentions, and hadn’t been caught.

I had to keep
reminding myself that I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was, that if
I got too cocky I could end up in trouble again. And this time I had
so much more to lose. Lili knew about the laptop, and my struggles to
keep from hacking, but what if I got caught again? Would she see my
actions as a betrayal of her trust, and be terribly hurt? Would she
stand by me, or would she dump me the way Mary had?

I had to be
strong enough to resist temptation. But just updating my tools wasn’t
illegal – or at least that’s what I told myself.

Rochester sat up
and sniffed me, and when my download finished I shut down the laptop
and lowered myself to the floor to rub his belly.

Rochester was a
constant reminder of what was important in my life. His love and
devotion had helped me climb out of the despair I had felt after I
left prison, and I was determined to do everything I could to take
good care of him.

I checked his
nail and dabbed more antibiotic cream on it, and when he dozed off I
Googled as many sites as I could find about what might have happened
and how I could help him heal. One site scared me – a vet blogged
about a dog whose owner had ignored an infection, which had then
spread to the dog’s vital organs, eventually causing its death.
That was not going to happen to Rochester.

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